Saturday, January 30, 2010

Transcription: John Berger Obituary

Since my post about LoC's Chronicling America, I've been playing with the site sporadically and to my surprise, I came across an obituary I'd been wanting but wasn'y expecting to find. My great-great-grandfather, John W. Berger died in 1891 so I knew that his obituary might not have been published or survived all these years. Looking through newspapers I thought his obituary might be in yielded no results so I gave up on an obituary for him awhile ago. To my suprise, he showed in, of all places, The Morning Call, a San Francisco (the other side of the Bay from Oakland where the family lived) paper:

15 Dec 1891, Image 8, The Morning Call (San Francisco, CA)

BERGER - In Oakland, December 12, John Berger (late minister of the German Evangelical Association), beloved husband of Susanna Berger, a native of Marshal(l) County, Ind., aged 50 years, 3 months and 25 days.

Friends and acquaintances are respectfully invited to attend the funeral THIS DAY (Tuesday), at 2 o'clock P.M., from the German M.E. Church, Seventeenth Street, between San Pablo and Telegraph avenues, Oakland. Interment Mountain View Cemetery.

For those wondering, the German Evangelical Association was an off-shoot of the Methodist Church geared towards Germans and those of German descent in the US. Services were conducted in German and the group was mainly popular in pockets of the Midwest with large German populations in the mid to late 1800s. Eventually the group was absorbed into the official Methodist Church.

This obituary doesn't have much new information but it is still nice to have. One thing I'm wondering about now is whether John was the minister of the church mentioned in the obituary. I knew he went to Oakland with the GEA to take over or start a new church in Oakland a year before he died, now I'm thinking the one mentioned might have been his parish at some time.

UPDATE: Just found another article on John's death from 7 Jan 1892, The San Francisco Call:

"The will of John Berger bequeathed an estate valued at $9000 to the widow and nine children."

About

I'm a 20-something, long-time genealogy enthusiast from Northern California. My paternal ancestry is mostly concentrated in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Ontario, Canada. On my mother's side, I am a 6th generation Californian, with ties further back to many of the lower 48 states.